No Time Off.

Greetings from Australia!  I hope you're all having a wonderful Easter and enjoying time with friends & family!  Even though it is one of the less popular holidays, I am totally bummed to be here and not with everyone back home eating cheese potatoes & 7 layered jello!  It has been a great past week here and the time has definitely started to slow down, knowing that I leave for outreach in only 2 1/2 weeks I believe.

For lectures, a man named Bryon Hunsburger spoke on the Living Word and we pretty much just skimmed the surface of the whole Bible in a week.  We looked at different stories in the Bible that are maybe less popular and how we can still relate and receive insight into what God is trying to show us.  It was a nice refresher for the Bible and how we can choose to make it exciting when we do some background research.  Even classic Bible stories that we read as kids, have deeper meanings if we just put the time in and look at the surrounding context of each stories.  Bryon was an awesome guy with some sick stories.  He went sailing for 5 months with a crew to distribute Bibles in the Philippines & started SBS (School of Biblical Studies) here in Sunshine Coast, which is the next level beyond DTS.

Beyond lectures, this has been a very eventful week.  Ultimately, I learned that God never takes time off, which is pretty obvious but sometimes it's hard to believe.  On the flip side, God doesn't expect us to take time off either.  Saturday night I was out with my buddies Osama & Tyler hanging out at the beach & McDonald just like any other night, when all of a sudden we were a loud BANG!  Immediately we took of running in the direction of the sound assuming it was something serious.  Adrenaline pumping, we ran up the hill and were the first ones on the scene of this car accident.  It was 3 college students who had totaled their car into a light pole.  Only 1 of them had a dislocated leg & the others were able to walk away.  In no time it became a huge scene as neighbors gathered & emergency vehicles came to light up the scene.  The 3 guys, Luke, Mitch, & Jye, were hysterical in disbelief and confused about what had just taken place.  A woman started asking if there were any Christians who could pray for these students emits all the chaos.  This was something I had never heard someone ask before and I wasn't really sure how to respond.  Eventually, we were able to pray over each of the guys and there is no doubt in my mind that God was there and angels were surrounding the car.  Right after we prayed, you could sense a change of heart in the guys and instead of freaking out about their destroyed car, they became thankful that they were still alive and could wake up the next morning a new day.  The whole event was a whole God thing and Luke with the dislocated leg, told us "I've never met anyone who would do this. People don't do this around here because they don't care."  This statement alone was so encouraging.  I'm not telling you this to brag about something I did with my buddies, but to show you how crazy God is and how he is always working in our lives and we just need to be ready for anything at anytime.  All glory to God!  There is a lot more that happened this night and we were able to discuss our beliefs with some of the neighbors before we headed home.

Everyday now I pass by that light pole and it is just a great reminder of God's devotion to our lives.  Often times it is just an ordinary day that God decides to wake us up and as Christians we can't take time off.  This doesn't mean that if we give our entire lives to Christ that he won't bless us with peace or rest, but he wants us to rely on his love everyday.

I went to the doctors on Tuesday and found out my eardrum has already started to heal so I'm back in the water!  Thanks for your prayers, not being able to surf for a month was starting to take a toll on me :)  This whole week we'll be staying in Byron Bay and meeting up with 2 other YWAM bases.  The week emphasis is evangelism and I'm stoked to put everything into practices for outreach preparation.

My outreach team bowling!

Glass House Mountain!

This is my outreach team!!! Fiji-ppines 4-Life!

I think it's really incredible that you've taken this time to read my blog and I hope you're able to take something away from it.  I honestly feel blessed for your interest in what God is doing in my life here in Australia.